The Cloister Walk Read Online Free Page A

speaks, mocking the young woman as she is put to death—as legend has it, for being a Christian and for refusing to become the concubine of Attila the Hun—I see the mockery transformed, in Hildegard’s hands, into a statement of defiance. Poets understand that they do not know what they mean, and that this is a source of their strength. I wonder, if in our modern, literal-minded age, being able to declare “what I do not see I do not know” is a mark, even a cornerstone, of a poet’s faith. I do not mean that we’re pragmatists, like Thomas, who asked to see and touch Christ’s wounds, but rather that writing teaches us to recognize when we have reached the limits of our language, and our knowing, and are dependent on our senses to “know” for us.
    The discipline of poetry teaches poets, at least, that they often have to say things they can’t pretend to understand. In contending with words, poets come to know their power, much the way monastics do in prayer and lectio. We experience words as steeped in mystery, forces beyond our intellectual grasp. In the late twentieth century, when speculative knowledge and the technologies it has spawned reign supreme, poets remain dependent on a different form of knowledge, perhaps akin to what Hildegard termed seeing, hearing, and knowing simultaneously. I wonder if what made Hildegard very much a twelfth-century person is part of what makes poets in the twentieth century seem both anachronistic and necessary.
    I am not well received. Something is off, a tension I can’t name. I won’t know for weeks how disastrous it will be.

September 29
MICHAEL, GABRIEL, RAPHAEL, ARCHANGELS
    Before my husband embarked on his South Seas journey, he installed a large National Geographic map of the region on the stark white wall by the kitchen table. When he called last night, he’d just arrived in Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. I found the words on the map, and fingered them as we spoke. I finger them again, at breakfast, to keep him in my presence. It’s our fifteenth anniversary. He’s staying at the Paradise Inn.
    We didn’t pick our wedding day for any particular reason. We eloped, continuing what has become a family tradition, on my mother’s side; both my grandmother Totten and my mother eloped when young—probably too young—and then built of this folly marriages that endured for close to sixty years. We’ve had just one church wedding within the last seventy years, and it resulted in our one divorce.
    One day, in a library reference room, I became curious to know if the date of our wedding had any significance in the Christian tradition. When I discovered that it was the feast of Archangels, I got the giggles and left before the librarian would have to throw me out.
    I have saved up things to tell David: a monk who’d complained to me about the resistance to change he’d encountered at work, who said, “It’s the well-worn idol named, ‘But we’ve never done it that way before!’ ” Exasperated, he’d said, “And people wonder how dogmas get started!” David laughs; he knows this is the feast of archangels, and tells me that he’s discovered that in the native religion of Tonga, whales are the messengers of the Gods, performing a function much like the eagle in Lakota religion, or angels in Christianity. In Nuku’alofa, which means, “The City Where Love Lives,” he purchased an amulet of a whale’s fluke, representing the divine messenger who moves between our world and that of the Creator, who lives at the bottom of the sea. The woman who sold it to him said it had been blessed by a Methodist bishop, but he could also take it to a priest of the old religion. “I did,” he said. “It cost me a six-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes,” he says, happily. I am happy to think of him walking around paradise wrapped in